Frank commentary from an unretired call girl

Bogeymen

I view the prostitute as one of the few women who is totally in control of her fate, totally in control of the realm of sex. The lesbian feminists tried to take control of female sexuality away from men — but the prostitute was doing that all along. – Camille Paglia

If I had to pick one single myth about whores which has done more damage to the cause of sex worker rights than any other, and which has inspired the greatest amount of wrongheaded, paternalistic legislation and the greatest number of dangerous, divisive, destructive policies, it would have to be the narrative that all or at least most women who do any kind of sex work (but especially prostitution) are dominated and controlled by violent “pimps”. Long before “sex trafficking” hysteria inflated the pimp legend into a cultic belief, laws against brothels and “living on the avails” were based upon the fallacious but widespread notion that whores are somehow more vulnerable to male domination than any other women, despite the obvious fact that the typical whore has far more experience handling men and resisting their aggressions than the typical amateur. Like the Madonna/whore duality and the myth of the wanton, the “pimp” myth is rooted in male insecurity; self-doubting men have a deep and abiding need to believe that sex is not under female control, so they immerse themselves in a lurid, exciting and adolescent fantasy that female sexuality is always controlled by men (pimps and customers), and that all heterosexual women who are not owned by husbands are instead owned by “pimps” and “traffickers”. Politicians who support “anti-pimp” and “anti-trafficking” laws thus cast themselves as white knights, “rescuing” helpless damsels from mustachioed villains who “exploit” them.

Female belief in the “pimp” myth comes from a similar direction: asexual or sexually immature women refuse to accept that other women might be so comfortable with sex that they can pragmatically employ it for income as one might employ any other skill, or might even actually enjoy it (with men even!) The idea that other women might be more sexually adept than they exacerbates their insecurities and must therefore be denied: the prohibitionist believes all women are as sexually stunted and unsatisfied as she is, therefore prostitutes must be forced into the trade by evil men (an idea which dovetails perfectly with the “male as oppressor” myth so beloved by radical feminists). The sex-hating female prohibitionist therefore becomes the ally of the “patriarchy” she so despises by supporting attempts to control female sexuality at gunpoint.

No matter what Western religions claim, sex is no different from any other human activity once the possibility of creating human life is removed by birth control. I strongly suspect that realization is the real driving force behind most of the current American anti-abortion, anti-birth control rhetoric: moralists (perhaps unconsciously) realize that without the threat of lifelong consequences, people will stop seeing sex as a magical sacrament which is “dangerous” without official sanctification. Without belief in the mystical significance of sex, prostitution is just another personal service like massage, hairdressing or wet-nursing; once one recognizes that one has to ask why feminists think it’s “progressive” for a man to be supported by a woman if she’s a politician or corporate executive, but “exploitative” if she’s a sex worker. In my column “Thought Experiment” I wrote,

…as I’ve pointed out on numerous occasions…the abusive, controlling pimp of legend is so rare we can consider him an anomaly. In fact, the fraction of prostitutes who have such an abusive pimp – roughly 1.5% – is so similar to the percentage of women who report that their husbands/boyfriends are either “extremely violent” (1.2%) or “extremely controlling” (2.3%) that it’s pointless to consider them a different phenomenon, especially when one considers that any non-client male found in the company of a whore will inevitably be labeled a “pimp” by cops or prohibitionists. The notion that hookers only have relationships with a certain kind of man, who is labeled a “pimp” by outsiders, derives from the Victorian fallacy (alas, still alive today) that we are somehow innately “different” from other women, and therefore our men are different as well. This is pure nonsense; the only consistent difference between the husbands of harlots and those of amateurs is that ours tend to be less hung up about sex.

…the report explicitly recommends that sex businesses are made legal, not just the sex worker. The Commission has recognised what all sex workers know – that laws against sex businesses mean they have to work in criminalised and therefore dangerous places. The spectre of the “pimp” and understandable squeamishness on the part of policy makers to be seen to sanction “pimping” functions as a powerful barrier to supporting sex workers calls for removal of all laws against adult sex work even among human rights NGOs and advocates. The reality is that sex workers in legal workplaces can challenge exploitation with the same tools that are available to other workers. This is fundamental to the notion that “sex work is work” and it is the embodied on the slogan “Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs”…Creation of the category “willing sex worker” as a subset of “sex worker”…suggests that very significant numbers of sex workers are enslaved, which is not borne out by experience or statistics. The risk is that programmes for health and human rights are seen as applicable only to a poorly defined subset of “willing” sex workers while sex workers deemed to be “unwilling” (or reluctant?) qualify only for raids, rehabilitation and anti-trafficking programmes. As I said in 2010, we don’t talk about “willing brides” because forced marriage exists or “consenting homosexuals” because some men are raped…

A free society is based in the conviction that every adult person has the right to make his or her own decisions, even if others don’t like those decisions or consider them foolish and/or self-destructive. Sex, whether or not one ascribes mystical qualities to it, is among the most personal of behaviors; it is therefore even less appropriate a realm for government interference than many others. Nobody but an individual has the right to decide which willing partners he will engage with, nor what their characteristics should be, nor how many at one time, nor how long the arrangement between them should last, nor why they choose to make that arrangement in the first place. Because human beings are imperfect it is inevitable that most of us will choose unwisely some of the time, and some of us will choose unwisely most of the time. And when those individuals are authoritarian leaders, the consequences of their bad choices are not only suffered by themselves, but by whomever they choose to inflict them upon…or by those who just happen to get in the way.

27 Responses

Over 30 years in the business, in one form or another, and how many of the classic, wildly dressed, Cadillac driving pimps have I seen? Zero. Now i have met a few men I’d call pimps. Officially, they were usually called husbands or boyfriends. Never mine.

Sure, I’ve worked for others. Strip club managers, video directors, agency owners/managers. Who hasn’t worked for someone else, and if this is so wrong why aren’t employees of corporations “trafficked?”

It continues to boggle my mind, the load of tripe people will believe about the sex business.

I have to say that agree with you with one caveat, there are people (agency owners) that do try to act like pimps… but they never last.

I have 15 years in the business, mostly as an owner of an escort agency. I can say with certainty that anyone, provider or owner / manager, that treats this as anything other then a business does not last long. That’s not to say that there are no bad agency owners just that it is a business and not a game.

I’ve never been ashamed of or hid that i was involved in the business, my family has known from day one and accepted it, but that still never stopped the barrage of people who would call me a pimp or worse. The very boring fact of owning an escort agency is that it’s all about advertising, advertising, advertising and finding the right people to work with. I have never forced, coerced, or otherwise made someone work for me. In fact, I’ve always encouraged everyone around me to pursue whatever makes them happy in their lives. I’m proud that i have many close friends from the years iv’e been involved in the adult industry.

And what happens to agency owners who try to act like pimps? Their best workers leave them, move on to better agencies. Bad employers always lose their best workers, regardless of the business. Odd how that works, isn’t it?

The thing people don’t get is that the sex business runs pretty much like any other. Back when I was working in it, I suspected that it drew disorganized, dysfunctional people. Then I worked for a corporation, and found I was very wrong!

I had the advantage of working in “straight” jobs for 12 years before entering the sex industry; the one area in which I saw more maladjusted, dysfunctional, ignorant, drug-addicted and EXPLOITED people than any other was sales.

it beats me how so many people think that in order to eliminate sex work all they need to do is raise minimum wage.the money is not the only problem when you do manual labour.why would someone in their right mind would like to work more hours for less money(this is absolute,even if they raise wages,there is no way for a waitress or a salesgirl to earn 200 dollars or euros per hour plus such a flexible scedule,not even people who do jobs,where university skills are needed can earn that much),doing far less pleasurable work,in which you have to serve any asshole no matter what,can obtain calouses and other much more serious health problems,getting exposed to the dangers of the factories and for a woman facing the danger of her beauty being diminished because of the hard labour and the conditions.yes,decent money and working conditions for theese people are essential,but the natures of their jobs wont change.working as a waitress=muscle problems,working in certain factories=expose to dangerous chemicals.perhaps if the money in such jobs becomes better some sex workers will leave their jobs for them,but honestly i doubt that the majority will,especially where the work is legal or decriminalised.Maggie,in what kind of sale jobs have you worked?i once thought it would be cool to earn my own money for the summer at my aunts clothing store,when i was 16;two weeks later i wanted to punch the fuck out of the fat slobs, who cried because they couldnt get in an medium sized(u.s size 8)dress and called me names for being unhelpful.not to mention the fact that i had to look at them wearing a mini dress and pretended that it was the hottest thing ive seen in my lifetime.

Both my teaching jobs were temporary fill-in ones, and when the second one ended (in January of 1988) I had no other prospects so I did the only job I could find: selling used cars. You know, that might be a fun post because I had a number of stripper clients and two escorts. Anyway, I left that one to move with Jack and sold advertising for a while, then worked at Radio Shack from autumn of 1988 to summer of 1989. And let me tell you, nearly everything prohibitionists claim about sex work (demeaning, exploitative, full of damaged people, etc) is MUCH more true of sales.

you were a teacher?thats so cool.thats the working feild that my studies(greek philology) lead the students to(if they are lucky with unemployement rates skyrocketing),although im not sure whether id like to work as a teacher yet.Maggie,would i be right when assuming that a big fear of prohibitionists is if the work becomes safer and the stigma reduced,that more women will choose it,instead of doing what are considered”minimum wage jobs”?.illegality keeps the salesgirl afraid of trying to make more money,while having enouph free time,stigma and propaganda make her think that it will be much more demeaning than what she currently does.for the women who are in the business already,i dont even know one pso who would prefer busting her ass serving assholes in a restaurant or factory work,even if the money were decent in theese jobs.how many escorts do you know?

Oh, I definitely think you’re right. They’re totally wrong, for the same reason that extreme promiscuity is unusual: it doesn’t agree with most women. But to the prohibitionist mind, everyone is an evil “sinner” who only refrains from “vice” due to fear of punishment. It’s a very pessimistic view of humanity.

It’s the same with homosexuality, and drugs for that matter. Those who advocate most stridently against it always act as if it’s accepted common knowledge that if society doesn’t oppress the hell out of homosexuality, why, everybody will be doing it! If we legalize weed, everybody will be smoking it! I suspect that these are people who themselves only abstain from “bad” behavior due to the fear of punishment.

Fear of Punishment is the whole control technique, Sailor, wether that’s religion or legislation or social or familial.

And yes, the prohibitionists probably would be the least well behaved without the fear, since they map their own deep-seated desires onto everyone else, just the same as they attempt to exforce their morality. If I am not allowed, nobody is.

And my reply to that? My choice, not yours. If my prospective “mate” is willing, that’s nobody elses business but ours.

No matter what Western religions claim, sex is no different from any other human activity once the possibility of creating human life is removed by birth control. I strongly suspect that realization is the real driving force behind most of the current American anti-abortion, anti-birth control rhetoric: moralists (perhaps unconsciously) realize that without the threat of lifelong consequences, people will stop seeing sex as a magical sacrament which is “dangerous” without official sanctification.

Yet women will still use sex as a means to manipulate men, and hence make the men run to prostitutes. Will this ever change ? Doubt it.

the prohibitionist believes all women are as sexually stunted and unsatisfied as she is …

I don’t necessarily buy that. See, I have this theory that many WOMEN buy into the “myth of the wanton” too. I say this because of the reaction of many Navy wives I ran across during my time in the Navy. Most of them didn’t like women being in the Navy to begin with – and they were certainly not happy when we started putting them on ships with the men. When I talked to these wives – it was blatantly obvious to me that they considered their husbands to be “angels” – but they could be “corrupted” if some “Jezebel” worked her “seductive spells” on them. A few wives would even admit it by saying … “Look, I know how female Sailors are …”

I really think that many women believe that their feminine race was divided into two parts – half of it consisting of “normal” and “responsible” women who engaged in “appropriate” sex … never enjoying it TOO much … and raising families and keeping a household. And the other part of their race consisting of women with nuclear powered sex drives on full-meltdown … and those women either became Whores – or female Sailors! LOL. And now that I’ve made that comparison I, in fact, do remember one wife drawing a comparison between the two when she said … “Well at least a Whore does it for money but these Navy women will drop to their knees if you give them the afternoon off!”

It was pretty poisonous stuff.

But … to be honest, I did find Navy women to be more sexually “liberated” than a lot of other women. I don’t think it was because their libido was constructed differently – but, it just seems that many treated sex as not a big deal and certainly something you could have fun with.

And I’ll say another thing too. When I was a Command Master Chief – I watched the men and the women (it was part of my responsibility to ensure that discipline didn’t break down due to shipboard sex – so it was forbidden completely). It was my observation that, the men were ready to pair up with the women as soon as we cast the lines off and got underway. Still, I had no worries until about day 40 – when the women would start to become “receptive” and then it was an explosive situation for myself and the ship’s Master at Arms to control. I don’t know if this is because the women started to want sex – or if they were just getting lonely for male companionship and – sex is just kind of what a girl does if she wants a guy to talk to her. I don’t know – but something was definitely going on there – I saw it happen on numerous occasions.

jealousy when you have a husband in such a job is normal and justified.if what i read from poets,who were also sailors is right, on top of being away from home for a very long time,meaning if you are faithful,no sex for a very long time,they do talk about getting incredibly lonely as well.if we are talking about the navy that gets engaged in war,even worse,because the negative emotions war causes do urge someone to find some kind of releif in sex.the fact that they blame the women for this is how most women are unfortunately like.it would be too painful to think that their so is the one who caused the pain they feel or even in the specific case the conditions of the job causes it,in which case they should blame themselves,because if they couldnt handle it they should never marry him,so they shift the blame to someone else.before women get accepted in the navy it was just the whores they visited,now its also the female sailors who get the blame.on a side note,i always wondered how women get accepted in the army in the first place.shouldnt someone who does this job be as physically strong as possible?physical strength is one thing that women will never be as good as men.

shouldnt someone who does this job be as physically strong as possible?physical strength is one thing that women will never be as good as men.

Man – you are VERY perceptive because not many civilians really catch on to this.

Yes, there are different physical standards for men and women – and the men must live up to a higher standard even if they hold the same job specialty as a woman does. For instance – a 17 year old male must be able to do 42 pushups or he fails. A 17 year old female – only 19 pushups. 17 year old men – must do better than 12:30 on the 1.5 mile run – women get 15 minutes.

Not logical – since there should be ONE standard set for physical performance for the job of a Sailor. However, to be honest – the requirements are also “reduced” for age. So a 45 year old man only has to do three more pushups than a 17 year old female.

Also – on the sex and war stress – yes, a lot of Sailors seek comfort in that (and maybe not just the male Sailors). When I held that job – I absolutely couldn’t engage in any questionable conduct – so hookers and even amateur women were off the menu for me. I really didn’t have the desire to do that kind of thing though, since this was way before my wife went through menopause and I had enough money to fly her out to a lot of ports we went to. And we tore the fuck out of some hotel rooms, let me tell you. When we were in Melborne, Australia once – we got carried away and my (rather small statured) wife “threw” me into the standup lamp in the room – and I hit it as I was falling with my shoulder – and IT hit the window and cracked the window. Bent the bejesus out of the lamp post too. I just remember looking up from the floor at my naked wife and she was saying … “sorrysorrysorrysorry – are you okay?” And I’m like … “Hell yah! That was awesome!”

And the thing is – since it was Australia, I just told the clerk at the desk the truth of what happened and he said not to worry about the damages.

So this kind of thing worked for me – up until my last deployment when I just couldn’t time a visit for my wife. I got a serious bout of anxiety but it wasn’t so much the war as it was the CO and XO actually PHYSICALLY fighting each other when they were alone in the same room. This put a lot of pressure on me – and I really should have reported it to the Admiral. However, I just told the CO that he wasn’t allowed to talk to the XO without me being in the room also – and yes, I realized I couldn’t give him orders but he had a choice in that he could obey – or I’d speak with the Admiral.

Along the same lines, krulac, when I was a whitebelt in a JiuJitsu dojo, as we were stretching and warming up, one of my fellow inductees was on the topic of biker women and how ugly they were. Until one of the yellow belts pointed to one of the black belts and said, “See Tom there? He used to be a biker. Guess where he met his wife…”

Tom looks over and just give a little smile, kinda like, well, I haven’t heard that before. But the whitebelt was almost as white as his gi.

I strongly suspect that realization is the real driving force behind most of the current American anti-abortion, anti-birth control rhetoric: moralists (perhaps unconsciously) realize that without the threat of lifelong consequences, people will stop seeing sex as a magical sacrament which is “dangerous” without official sanctification.

I like Heinlein’s limerick on the topic,

There once was a young lady named Wilde
Who kept herself quite undefiled
by thinking of Jesus
and venereal diseases
And the dangers of having a child

As a new poster I must say I’m not the least bit surprised at those in power lying, twisting and using word games facts to accomplish their goals. I know those in power hide behind a facade of morality but in truth and are far more sexually twisted than one dare imagine, example the allegations members of congress use Boys Town for pedophile pleasures, but I digress. Thank you Maggie, and keep up the good fight maybe one day the majority will reach back grab their ears and yank their heads free, and see the truth, no victim, no crime.

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